John Banville Ancient Light

For fans of Colm Toibin's Brooklyn and Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending, the story of obsessive young love and the power of grief - Ancient Light is the best novel yet from the Booker Prize winner of The Sea 'Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother.' Alexander Cleave, an actor who thinks his best days are behind him, remembers his first unlikely affair as a teenage boy in a small town in 1950s Ireland: the illicit meetings in a rundown cottage outside town; assignations in the back of his lover's car on sunny mornings and rain-soaked afternoons. And with these early memories comes something sharper and much darker - the more recent recollection of the actor's own daughter's suicide ten years before. 'I should like to be in love again, I should like to fall in love again, just once more.' Ancient Light is the story of a life rendered brilliantly vivid: the obsession and selfishness of young love and the terrifying shock of grief. It is a dazzling novel, funny, utterly pleasurable and devastatingly moving in the same moment. 'He is a master, and his prose gives continuous, sensual delight' Martin Amis on John Banville